I wasn’t planning on doing more on frozen mammoths after yesterday’s discussion of dining on them, but I found myself increasingly intrigued by the fact that so many fringe history claims for flash-frozen mammoths and eating mammoth steaks trace back to a single 1960 article by Ivan T. Sanderson in the Saturday Evening Post. He was not the first to report the claims (having apparently learned of them from Immanuel Velikovsky, according to secondary sources), but his piece directly or indirectly bequeathed the story to biblical creationists like Donald Patten (who claimed Alaskan restaurants served mammoth in the twentieth century), Charles Hapgood (a close friend of Sanderson’s), David Childress, Graham Hancock, and a host of others. So I went to the library to get a copy to find out exactly what Sanderson said.

Sometimes I wish that most of the innovations in bizarre claims weren’t made so long ago that everyone involved is now dead. Sanderson starts his article by saying that frozen food companies were intrigued by his inquiries into how to flash-freeze an elephant and wanted to experiment with it! I’d have loved to talk to one of those frozen food executives to inquire as to exactly how they thought it possible or why they would even try such a thing. Anyway, Sanderson says he began his inquiry because he (wrongly) believed that wooly mammoths had been flavor-sealed in Arctic ice: “The reason for my question is simply that we already have lots of frozen elephants; the flesh of some of them has retained its full flavor, and I want to know how the job was done.” He cites the notorious Beresovka mammoth as one such toothsome delight, mistaking the explorers’ dogs’ lack of gustatory discrimination for proof that the flesh was fresh.

Sanderson also asserted that the mammoth had been frozen so quickly that its last meal of buttercups were still freshly in bloom in its mouth. “Upon the [tongue] and between the teeth, were portions of the animal’s last meal, which for some incomprehensible reason it had not had time to swallow.” This one fact gave rise to a 56 years of speculation about “instant” freezing of the mammoths in some catastrophist disaster. The scientist who studied the mammoth in situ, Dr. Otto Herz, had written that “more [food] is found on the tongue and between the teeth,” and he assumed that the mammoth died while he was eating, tumbling off a cliff or down a slope to his death. He wrote that the mammoth was not flash-frozen, but rather likely died in a mud pit that froze over shortly after the animal’s death and became buried under layers of dirt. The decrepit state of the flesh reported by the explorers is more than enough to refute Sanderson’s misimpression that the mammoth was fresh enough to eat.

It’s interesting that the report of finding the remains of buttercups in the mammoth’s stomach gradually morphed under catastrophist and creationist influence into something it was never intended to be. Modern writers routinely claim that the mammoth died instantly with “buttercups in its mouth,” or some variation thereof. Herz had reported that there was the remains of food in the animal’s mouth, and later on, in 1905, this was more specifically detailed by A. V. Borodin, who did not find flash-frozen salad but rather reported that bits of food were stuck between the animal’s teeth. By 1912, there was already the beginning of a suggestion of flash-freezing, which the scientist J. P. Felix gave in his Das Mammuth von Borna: “On uncovering the skull a portion of the animal’s food was found in the form of a wad lying between the upper and lower teeth. Its death, therefore, must have been so sudden that it did not have time to swallow this food” (trans. Henry Fairfield Osborn). Felix didn’t mean that the mammoth had frozen at the moment of death, but it was easy enough to read it that way. The stomach contents, according to an English-language account published in 1925, included several species of grass, sedges, mint, legume pods, wild poppies, and “seeds of the northern butter daisy (Ranunculus).” Somehow the butter daisy seeds morphed into flash-frozen buttercups still in bloom! This appears to be due to some phrasing in a report written by E. V. Pfizenmayer in August 1939 called “Les mammouths de Siberie,” which I have not read but which is cited frequently as the source for the buttercup claim. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, what was actually found was pollen from the buttercups, both between the teeth and in the stomach.

For those who care, Felix said that the exact species was Ranunculus acer L. var. borealis, the common buttercup.

Thus, V. Paul Flint, the creationist, wrote in 1988: “Little flowering buttercups, tender sedges and grasses exclusively were found in the stomach of the Beresovka mammoth.” One creationist ventured that the mammoth froze in half an hour or less on the basis of this evidence. Such claims drew on a dispute in the Russian literature of the early 1900s in which different groups of scientists argued about the season of the mammoth’s death, with some arguing for July due to immature pollen and others for fall based on mature vegetables.

Sanderson claimed that the stomach contents froze so rapidly that decomposition did not occur, indicating temperatures dropping from 60 above to 150 below zero Fahrenheit or colder instantly, due, he thought, to volcanic activity. However, he had misunderstood the scientific literature and mistook the list of grasses and plants for the leaves of these. The scientists identified the plants by their seeds, which were preserved, not their leaves, which had decayed into an unidentifiable mass.

But I was terribly disappointed to find that the claim that Fairbanks, Alaska, had mammoth steaks on restaurant menus did not appear in Sanderson’s article. Donald Patten’s only citation on the page of Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch (1966) where the claim appears pointed to Sanderson’s article, so I had expected to find it there. Did Patten just make the claim up? I think he probably was repeating secondhand testimony of something misunderstood. Fairbanks, Alaska, was indeed involved with mammoth flesh about two decades before Patten wrote, when excavators uncovered several specimens of mammoth on which the flesh still clung between the 1930s and 1950s. The most famous of these was the mummified mammoth Otto Geist found in 1948. This activity created great interest at the time, and in July 1944 Harper’s magazine carried a report by Frank C. Hibben that evoked the stench of “thousands of tons of rotting mammoth meat” newly thawed and the desire of those who encountered it to taste the black and rotting flesh: “Nothing would do but that we taste a piece of almost black, frozen mammoth meat.” This may be the origin of Patten’s claim, or else restaurants celebrated the local mammoths with meals named for them.

It was probably McDonalds in Alaska that was serving the Mammoth meals, but you had to hurry because they were only there for a short time, like McPizza, remember that.

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Jonathan Feinstein

2/6/2016 06:06:25 pm

Sing along: You deserve a break today....

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DaveR

2/8/2016 09:34:54 am

Da da da da da...I'm lovin' it!

crainey

2/6/2016 01:31:56 pm

This topic relates to something I’ve encountered over the years having to do with people claiming that the Earth’s poles have swapped position at times in the past. Flash frozen mammoths have been used as evidence to support this idea. I believe Velikovsky wrote about it but he was apparently not the first to do so. In college I had a running debate with a roommate about this very topic. What happens is that people reference scientific evidence that the magnetic poles have shifted position many times over Earth’s history (and seem to be getting ready to do so again) and read this as evidence of the Earth actually flipping over. Its an excellent example of the misreading of true science as evidence in support of fringe theories.

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Ken

2/6/2016 05:45:31 pm

Velikovsky claimed the earth flipped due to a near miss with what is now thw planet Venus. His 'theory' was from the early '50s. Magnetic pole flipping was not discovered until the comprehensive sea floor studies of the IGY around 1957 and became accepted theory in the early '60s. Velikovsky's 'evidence' was passages from Egyptian, bible, and Mayan references to the sun rising in the east, then overnight stopping, and starting to rise in the west. Also claimed were pictures of constellations inside pyramids which were "backwards". All this allegedly occurred around 1500 BCE and was also linked to the plagues and Moses' exodus from Egypt. V. lists many references, of which I was not interested enough to check, but it makes for a most entertaining story.

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Pop Goes the Reason

2/6/2016 08:08:54 pm

When the poles flip, do polar bears become bipolar?

Ysne58

2/6/2016 02:10:24 pm

2nd line increasing should be increasingly

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anon

2/6/2016 10:43:02 pm

zero adverb ? shakespeare would have been ok with it.

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David Bradbury

2/6/2016 02:27:14 pm

The Pfizenmayer book is available online at:
http://rcin.org.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?id=3278&from=publication

It's in DJVu format, and I found the HTML5 browser support painfully slow, so you may want to try one of the other options. The section on the mammoth's food starts at page 139 [= page 146 in the online viewer].

The relevant passages seem to be (my translation):
"The remains of forage in the mouth, just like the partly-intact food remains in the stomach (of which remains we were subsequently able to conserve about 15 kilos) consisted exclusively, as I have already said, of herbaceous species and larger flowering plants which still revealed parts of seed capsules; on the other hand, there were found no conifer remains, as a result of which it must be admitted that needle-leaved trees did not feature in the menu of our pachyderm.
Later, at the botanical museum of the Academy of Sciences, there was success in identifying a number of the plants in the stomach contents.
...
One could identify, among the various representatives of this northern flora, some sedges (types of carex). Among the higher flowering plants, one could clearly recognise thyme (Thymus serpillum), a labiate very widespread on the heathlands of Europe; then the yellow poppy of the Alps (Papaver alpinum var. xanthopetala); the bitter sharp buttercup ["renoncule amère tranchante"] (Ranunculus acer borealis) which is also preserved in the Alps as a survivor of the glacial period; a species of gentian and a species of cypripedium (orchid); Thalictrum alpinum; Atragene alpina var. sibirica and various other plants which are still to be found today in northern Siberia."

15 kilos of pollen is most improbable, so I think substantial amounts of the actual plants (though not necessarily the petals) were preserved.

Isn't it interesting how nobody ever seems to know what they're talking about once you get beyond the first generation or so of copyists? It certainly sounds, though, like the remains weren't in a state of preservation to qualify as freshness-sealed, though apparently in much better condition than some later scientific writers assumed. The buttercups aren't in the mouth, though, and seem to have been frozen alongside all the other stomach contents. I wonder why, other than the fact that they are flowers, fringe writers seized on the buttercups and nothing else, not even the poppies?

I wonder if the discrepancy in the later scientific accounts stems from the plant remains decaying after they were thawed out, leaving only seeds and pollen to study?

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David Bradbury

2/7/2016 04:29:30 am

The explanation for the pollen / whole plants discrepancy is obvious in restospect. The whole plants were examined as soon as they could be got back to civilisation, but the remains were preserved, and in the 1950s, as reported by the USGS, were "revisited" for pollen analysis.

The original findings were internationally reported by Prof. W. Salensky of St. Petersburg at the sixth International Zoological Congress in 1904, under the title "Ueber die Hauptresultate der Erforschung des im Jahre 1901 am Ufer der Bereskowa entdeckten maennlichen Mammuthcadavers"
https://archive.org/stream/compterendudess00inte#page/66/mode/2up

anon

2/6/2016 10:48:21 pm

are you going to gnaw mammoth cadavers
orchid, poppy, buttercup and thyme

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Time Machine

2/6/2016 04:47:20 pm

>>> first generation or so of copyists<<<

Does not alter the fact that they regard *everything" (including their own dross) as "opinion* --- thus being able to generate infinite possibilities in the process --- and the more contradictory and diverse in nature --- the better.

Good workouts for the gullible and uncritical mind.

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KING AND PRIEST LOL

2/6/2016 05:12:35 pm

Oh come on, you know you'd rather babble about FREEMASONRY BRINGS SECULAR PARADISE THRONE AND ALTAR ALL FALL DOWN DERP

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Clete

2/6/2016 05:50:18 pm

Whatever your smoking, could you get me some?

Time Machine

2/6/2016 07:18:14 pm

Suck on this, pseudo-sceptics and ignorants...

Owen Chadwick, "The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century" (Cambridge University Press, 1975).

Time Machine

2/6/2016 07:19:53 pm

Religious Fundamentalists posing as pseudo-sceptics.

Time Machine

2/6/2016 07:34:50 pm

The UK only has only had a constitutional monarchy (look up the meaning) and the only people who belly-ached about King Edward VIII marrying Wallis Simpson were the stuffed-shirt politicians and as to why they objected remains a mystery since Camilla Parker Bowles is a divorced woman married to the future King of England.

The UK is a "Kingdom" in name only and is a 150% Republic holding democratic elections every 5 years and where the Monarch's Speech is written by the Prime Minister.

Time Machine

2/7/2016 01:23:33 am

It's funny how the religious fundamentalists belly-ache about Freemasonry because they are the ones that are still writing anti-Semitic New World Order books about Freemasonry today, in 2016 --- and there are also Religious Fundamentalist websites online about the same thing. The Freemasons are really Jews who are the secret masters of the World. This nonsense is taken seriously in Eastern European countries where anti-Semitism refuses to budge from the social structures of those countries.

It's not apparent from the regalia, degrees, rites and myths of Freemasonry that it was a subversive political organisation out to create a New World Order --- yet that's precisely what happened during the French Revolution. The symbolism of the Temple of Jerusalem and Freemasonry's lack of anti-Semitism when it was a typical trait in Western societies encouraged the misconception within the Roman Catholic Church.

Pliny preserved a letter by the Roman Emperor Trajan who advised against the formation of Fire Brigades because this spawned secret societies that engaged in political subversion.

So the idea of secret societies linked to political subversion goes back to Ancient Rome.

KING AND PRIEST LOL

2/7/2016 01:52:51 am

Thanks for obliging me, Time Machine. You really have no sense of humor at all, do you? I prompted you to babble, then I come back and find that you've obeyed me to the letter.

Clete, all you need to do is read this fellow's rants for the past couple months to get a fine high.

David Bradbury

2/7/2016 04:17:26 am

Time Machine: "why they objected remains a mystery since Camilla Parker Bowles is a divorced woman married to the future King of England."
Sorry, but there are at least two reasons why it's not a mystery at all. Try some historical research.

Shane Sullivan

2/6/2016 07:11:03 pm

I've never really understood why Hapgood, and later Hancock, would latch onto this one in the first place. As I recall, neither one of them imagined crustal displacement occurring so quickly that a healthy adult mammoth strolling happily through a meadow of flowers would be instantly snap-frozen like the T-1000.

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anon

2/6/2016 10:44:56 pm

if the meat was frozen, that means the milk in pregnant females would have been frozen too. why, then, no tales of squeezing out freshly thawed milk from mammoth teats ? hm ?

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anon

2/8/2016 08:15:06 pm

"The UK is a "Kingdom" in name only and is a 150% Republic holding democratic elections every 5 years and where the Monarch's Speech is written by the Prime Minister."

rubbish. house of lords

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E.P. Grondine

2/8/2016 10:55:51 pm

HI Jason -

The mammoth near Fairbanks were found during a hydraulic dredging operation which consumed the deposit which Hibbens and others viewed.

It would be interesting to track down the ivory from those deposits (which ended up in piano keys and cueballs) and have it carbon dated. My guess is that it would date to one or the other of the massive comet impacts that occurred at the beginning of the Holocene.

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Todd S

11/25/2017 04:08:39 pm

The author of this piece sort of belittles Mr. Sanderson, as if Mr. Sanderson was a creationist or something....he wasn't, at all. He really felt the mammoths were convincing evidences of a catastrophic event.

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.